TreatMe launches with $1 burgers – if you can get one

TreatMe launched their group buying deals today (22nd March) with $1 burgers from BurgerFuel in Auckland and $1 bagels from Wholly Bagels in Wellington, however it didn’t go off without a hitch, with loads of people (including myself) constantly getting errors when trying to make a purchase. It appears their magical elves in the background kept slipping up:

TreatMe.co.nz Server 500 slip up

After having a big build up in the social media space prior to launch, they started getting a lot of feedback on Twitter and Facebook – remembering this is all happening at between 11pm and 1am, when most sane people are snugly tucked up in bed sleeping and not thinking about what’s for lunch or dinner tomorrow.

There was a similar response on their Facebook page, with lots of unhappy customers. Their fan base grew from around 500 fans prior to midnight to over 1500 by the morning – although some full page advertising would have helped them along.

There were some successes however in the first hour, in fact by 1am over 3000 burgers had been purchased already, and a little after 8am, they sold out of all 20,000 burgers. TreatMe seem to be getting into the social space quite well, with their Twitter and Facebook activity quite high during the launch – lets hope they keep that up, and lets hope they address some of the negative feedback they received during the launch, rather than constant bragging and re-tweeting their successes. They pretty much stopped responding to the bad, and only commented on the good – not a bad thing, but they annoyed a lot of people last night (including myself!)

I am happy to report however that after well over 20 attempts to purchase (I have now memorised my credit card details!) I successfully purchased a burger for myself and another as a gift, and was a huge sigh of relief to see this finally appear: